Table of Contents

Notes

Hugh Howey

(1) As you may know, I’ve begun a weekly feature with The Bookseller in London, “Porter Anderson Meets,” in which I interview a newsmaker each Monday, live on Twitter, and then produce an article from the interview for The Bookseller magazine, which is on the stands each Friday. It’s a lot of fun, great working with Philip Jones, Nigel Roby and their team. And this Monday, December 9, our interviewee will be author Hugh Howey (who, with Jane Friedman, is a keynote speaker at PubSmart in April). You’re welcome to look in on us during the interview, which will start at 11 a.m. Eastern, 4 p.m. GMT in London, 8 a.m. Pacific. Our hashtag for these Monday interviews is #PorterMeets.

In case you’d like to subscribe to The Bookseller’s magazine, there’s information here (and a weekly Yudu rendition of the print edition that’s very good). And we had so much good material from our interview with Dominique Raccah, Sourcebooks’ founding publisher and winner of The Bookseller’s FutureBook award for Most Inspiring Digital Publishing Person, that the team in London has put together an online workup of that #PorterMeets chat you can see here.

(2) Cool changes are ahead for the weekly sister column to this one, Ether for Authors at Publishing Perspectives. Starting Tuesday, December 10, we’re going to sharpen things up a bit, calling it Issues on the Ether. Each Tuesday, the column will focus on a key issue (or a couple of competing ones, perhaps), and then on Wednesdays, we hope you’ll join us for a live Twitter chat about the topic(s), hosted by Ed Nawotka and me. We’re getting such robust response to the Ether that this seems a natural step to take and we’d love to have your input. Our hashtag for these Wednesday chats is #EtherIssue.

(3) Congrats to my and Jane’s colleagues and community at Writer Unboxed. At this writing, Technorati is ranking the site at #3 (of 19,760 Books blog sites). BookRiot and Tor.com are looking over their shoulders now.

And maybe those 32 ways and means can supply you with the “secrets” and the “tools” to “take it to the next level” and finally achieve such a gloriously numbered state that something actually adds up to “giving 110 percent” to your goal. Not for nothing do we like those headlines:

Within the context of a Web page or Facebook stream, with their many choices, a list is the easy pick, in part because it promises a definite ending: we think we know what we’re in for, and the certainty is both alluring and reassuring.

In A List of Reasons Why Our Brains Love Lists at the New Yorker, she sorts through various points of research and observation to explain—very ably, I think—why these sometimes maddening list-headlines are so prevalent, especially in the work of writers blogging for other writers.

For me, the most compelling case she makes is for what we might call defensive reading. I made that up, mind you, don’t blame it on Konnikova. But here’s what she means:

The more we know about something—including precisely how much time it will consume—the greater the chance we will commit to it. The process is self-reinforcing: we recall with pleasure that we were able to complete the task (of reading the article) instead of leaving it undone and that satisfaction, in turn, makes us more likely to click on lists again—even ones we hate-read.

If we’re trying to defend our time (and God knows we are), we choose the apparent safety of a list to read.

Konnikova does caution that “Once our attention has been ensnared, we still need to be sufficiently intrigued to read the story.”

And she cites material from the University of Athens, 2009, in which researchers “found that people preferred headlines that were both creative and uninformative, like ‘THE SMELL OF CORRUPTION, THE SCENT OF TRUTH’ or ‘FACE TO FAITH.’ They not only rated them as more interesting over-all but also indicated that they would be more likely to read the corresponding stories.”

In our constant churn of community-facing how-to pieces for writers, however, this endless conversation we keep having with ourselves, we tend to drop the allure-and-charm appeal we may offer consumers—readers. We frequently opt to speak to each other, instead, with promises of defensive reading: short, bulleted, get-in-get-out, fix-you-right-up lists.

Tips ‘n’ tricks.

Konnikova helps us understand why this works for us.

In the current media environment, a list is perfectly designed for our brain. We are drawn to it intuitively, we process it more efficiently, and we retain it with little effort.

And she hints at why, on the wider scale, it doesn’t:

That’s just fine, as long as we realize that our fast-food information diet is necessarily limited in content and nuance, and thus unlikely to contain the nutritional value of the more in-depth analysis of traditional articles that rely on paragraphs, not bullet points.

For every celebrity book bought this Christmas, the Government should buy one written by an author.

In an interesting parallel round of articles lately, however—in no way directly related to Konnikova’s piece, and sometimes only broadly related to each other—we can glimpse things that don’t easily “list up” the way we might like them to in publishing.

These are issues that resist both the tips ‘n’ the tricks because they make us look at unresolved, hard-to-grasp, difficult-to-handle gray areas in the digital dynamic, factors that simply aren’t going to lie down for us in nice numbered rows so we can tick them off with little square USA Today boxes and call them “done and done.”

You’re not expected to provide us with the solutions, although many of us would be really grateful if you’d do that. Just bounce off each of these quickly, simply to remind yourself that it’s not all containable, not all sortable, not all responsive to what Konnikova calls our “general tendency to categorize things.”

I’ll make it even easier for our defensive reading radar: these are just:

“Anything Except Readerly Books”

The digital future for narrative reading — fiction and non-fiction — is much clearer than it is for any other kind of book. Publishers of novels can apparently count on their sales shifting from print to digital and from in-store to online without losing a lot of readers…But publishers of everything else have no basis for similar confidence.

He echoes a point that Ether host, publishing specialist, and Scratch magazine co-creator Jane Friedman has made many times: in the age of the Internet, there’s a real question of how useful an old-style how-to book (he uses the example of David Hessayon’s gardening books) can be when all can be online, update-able and searchable.

Shatzkin writes:

No general publisher that I’m aware of has announced “we won’t do illustrated books anymore”. I have purely anecdotal evidence from people who once worked there and left that Random House — the one publisher I know that really tried to convert a lot of its illustrated content to ebooks over the past few years — is de-emphasizing illustrated book publishing. I have been given to understand that one of the leading art book publishers is now doing more straight text publishing, which is sensible if art books don’t port to digital.

We’ll hear more about this at Digital Book World in January. Shatzkin is again the chair of the conference and is programming it with several cross-currents. (For example, there’s a session called “Start-Ups Working with Publishing” followed by one called “Publishers Working with Start-Ups.”)

When I touched that physical book again for the first time in years, it was like the moment you hear a nostalgic song on the radio and are instantly lost in it. The feeling of a print book, with its rough paper and thick spine, is an absorbing and pleasurable experience — sometimes more so than reading on a device.

Yes, this is Mr. Let Us Use Our Devices During Takeoff and Landing, a valiant proponent of dismissing some flaky FAA rules—I’ve appreciated him fighting the good fight for us en l’air.

But this? Well, this is indicative of more slipping and sliding out there than we sometimes like to contemplate in the world of “new reading.”

As with other digital gray areas, many folks are not, actually, as settled on an e-reading future as we sometimes may like to think. Bilton:

I personally still read books on my iPad, specifically when I travel, where e-books weigh next-to-nothing and can now be read during take-off and landing. But at home on my couch, I’m definitely going to continue reading print books too, even if Pixel doesn’t like them.

“Where I Get Unhappy”

Publishers are innovating constantly, but subtly, internally, and on their own terms…and what is needed is a full-on skunkworks from which the conventional trade could produce new possibilities rather than tweak old ones. In any case, we haven’t seen any evidence of a disruptive change coming out of the traditional houses, and I think that’s dangerous in the longer term, both to their well-being as companies and to the trade at large.

Nick Harkaway

The stuff I see from Big 5 publishers is very much about mitigation and resilience in the face of the digital tidal wave. There’s no suggestion that anyone might try to leapfrog the digital giants’ development.

There’s an interesting melancholy to Harkaway’s piece. For one thing, he makes the case against the current idea of “social reading” (a sort of real time discussion about what’s being read) this way:

I love to be in a group, but I’m an introvert – in the modern sense that I don’t easily draw energy from the experience but expend energy on it. Reading is a place where I recharge, and the idea of having my hearthspace further drawn into the public environment is not appealing. However, I may be in the minority there.

Harkaway is right. The several concepts of social reading (we’re not all agreed on what we mean with the term) may not be based on a strong understanding of reader interest.

And the really soft area he gets at most effectively is the fact that for all we speak of innovation, it can be very hard to be sure at times whether we’re driving it or it’s driving us.

Changes that disrupt the business model by making it more perfectly centred on delivering reading are changes that the industry should not just embrace but seek out and above all imagine before anyone else does. Publishing cannot continue to await the benevolent indulgence of digital for ever. Sooner or later, we need to see publishing setting an agenda for digital to meet rather than the other way around.

Those Lists

Something of how we talk to each other, even in how-to’s about freelancing and blogging-by-the-numbers, eventually does affect the work, of course.

Maybe the next literary “big book” isn’t going to come out with bullet points but our perfectly understandable drive for simplification in the industry! the industry! doesn’t get at the complex realities we need to contemplate.

Do you feel at times that we might be overdoing the listicles and not spending enough time wading into the tougher dilemmas facing publishing today?

When the apocalypse happens, the only things left will be roaches and my mother's four Electrolux vacuums.

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Porter Anderson / @Porter_Anderson

Porter Anderson (@Porter_Anderson) is a journalist and consultant in publishing. He's The Bookseller's (London) Associate Editor in charge of The FutureBook. He's a featured writer with Thought Catalog (New York), which carries his reports, commentary, and frequent Music for Writers interviews with composers and musicians. And he's a regular contributor of "Provocations in Publishing" with Writer Unboxed. Through his consultancy, Porter Anderson Media, Porter covers, programs, and speaks at publishing conferences and other events in Europe and the US, and works with various players in publishing, such as Library Journal's SELF-e, Frankfurt Book Fair's Business Club, and authors. You can follow his editorial output at Porter Anderson Media, and via this RSS link.

Great post, as usual, Porter. I found a lot of interesting info, and I especially liked the link to the guest post article and the fact that it seems the Big 5 are simply keeping up with or “mitigating” the e-book tide and not trying to innovate. That doesn’t seem like a winning approach to me. Maybe they feel they’re just too big to die … others who probably thought that too were the dinosaurs. Didn’t work out too well for them.

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5 years ago

AJ Sikes

Good Morning, Porter 🙂 I’m not sure when it happened. Perhaps it was the tenth, or twenty-fifth of Chuck Wendig’s list blogs that I read, but I got a bad taste in my mouth about what I was reading. It no longer felt helpful and had instead become something I felt obligated, duty-bound even, to read. Chuck’s shock-blogging almost tickled this infantry veteran’s eardrums. But the list…had I read this particular list before? How many lists should I read before settling down to write for the day? Did I need to read some specific lists? Is there a list canon?… Read more »

@f8089fc9074b34812a8c6b0347bb80ba:disqus Hey, Aaron, I think you’re right on the money with these observations. While I don’t think it’s intentional at all, there does seem to be — after a time, at least — a kind of talking-down tone to the listicles approach. I’m actually not sure that established writers don’t look at blog posts from time to time … nobody is all that sure of his or her technique or smarts in this game. They’re just better at staying quiet about it. It does them less good in some ways to look communal and blog-brotherly/sisterly than it does newcomers who… Read more »

@davidgaughran:disqus
Ha! I actually toyed with “Janes Friedmen” for about 20 seconds. 🙂

Hope the setup in Prague is going well, sounds like a terrific move!
-p.

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5 years ago

GrigoryRyzhakov

It’s hard to expect innovation from traditional publishers. They are traditional and therefore conservative. As long as they make big money they won’t change much, it’s risky. I’m not talking about such changes as acquiring vanity publishing companies by big 5. This is easy money, there’s nothing easier than parasitising on writers’ hopes. So, I’m impressed with Penguin’s wish to experimentate with reading experience formats.